Horgan: Terror in Boston: 'This is personal'

Boston Red Sox players line up for the National Anthem all wearing number 42 in honor of Jackie Robinson Day before a baseball game between the Red Sox and the Tampa Bay Rays at Fenway Park in Boston Monday, April 15, 2013. (AP Photo/Winslow Townson)

I grew up a couple relay throws north of Boston and then spent a significant portion of my adult working life working in and around the city and I can tell you there is one thing you will never hear in Boston:

You’ll never hear anyone say it’s not personal.

You won’t hear that malarkey in conversations on the streets or in the bar talk of Southie’s taverns. You won’t hear it in the trattorias in the North End or the bleachers at Fenway Park.

Just as Tip O’Neill was spot-on when he said all politics is local, I’m dead-on with this: In Boston, it’s always personal.

And so it is with the horrific events Monday at the finish line of the 117th Boston Marathon. If you’re from Boston, this is intensely personal, regardless of whether you knew or were related to anyone injured or killed in the senseless carnage that flowed from the two explosions 12 seconds apart on Boylston Street, almost directly across the street from the modern location of our nation’s first free municipal lending library.

To understand this, you have to understand something of Boston and then you need to comprehend where Patriot’s Day fits into the local tableau.

First, the city:

By any measure, Boston is a world-class city. It has internationally-renowned colleges and universities. It has some of the finest museums in the world and (thankfully given the events of Monday) some of the world’s great hospitals. It is a mecca of sports, culture and culinary arts.

But with all of that, the Hub remains, perhaps in a tie with San Francisco, America’s most provincial city.

Partly, it is because of the size of the city. Boston is only this big (imagine my thumb and index finger inches apart), an eminently walk-able city made even more enjoyable by its unabashed love affair with its history and traditions.

Much like Savannah, despite the encroachment of modernity, much of what mattered 300 years ago still remains throughout the city’s neighborhoods and if you live there, that history seeps seamlessly into your life and serves as a backdrop to your daily coming and going.

Partly too, that provincialism stems from what Boston became on its journey from the colonial period, through the Revolution and on through America’s golden ages of expansion and industrialization.

Or perhaps, more accurately, what it didn’t become: It didn’t become New York, even though it very much wanted to.

As the capital, trade and commercial interests flowed south to the shores of Manhattan, Boston was left to its step-brother status.

And it clung to that status with a self-involved stubbornness that only a city steeped in the Irish-American culture could (hey, my full name is Terrence Sean Patrick Horgan and I come by this opinion honestly).

So Boston became a city that cared primarily about Boston things. Things like the Boston Pops, the Fourth of July on the Esplanade, the Kennedys, small college football, fried clams, a good chowder and a cold Narragansett.

We love our own bands like Aerosmith, J.Geils, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, the Del Fuegoes, Duke and the Drivers, the Sidewinders and Bonnie Raitt (she grew up in New York, but she’ll always be Boston to us).

Love that dirty water? You bet we do. And, perhaps more than all of the above combined, we love sports.

I know, you’re sick to death of the whole Red Sox thing. And if you’re not sick of that, then certainly you’re sick of the whole Tom Brady-Bill Belichick Patriots thing. And before that, through the 1950s, 60s and then the Bird 80s, you were probably sick of the Celtics.

And that brings us to Patriot’s Day.

The Boston Marathon, an event that stretches back to 1897, stands as the longest continually run marathon in the world. The Marathon (always upper-case M) was the quintessential Boston thing. It originally was run on April 19 and then moved to the third Monday in April when Patriot’s Day became an official state holiday in 1969. That gave Bay Staters an annual three-day weekend.

The day is special for so many reasons. It commemorates the seminal battles for freedom at Lexington and Concord, but for most New Englanders, it also signals the official arrival of spring after the often-brutal New England winters.

The Red Sox always play at home on Patriot’s Day and start at the uncivilized hour (at least by MLB standards) of 11 a.m. so fans can get out in time to catch the finish of the race.

And what really makes the day special is the Marathon. The 26.2 mile course runs from the small, incredibly quaint New England town of Hopkinton out beyond Boston’s western suburbs, through the western towns of Framingham and Wellesley (where the Wellesley College girls turn out in force), up through the ribbon of hills that rise through tony Newton and down into the city proper.

The route is lined by hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom, like on St. Patrick’s Day here, come from families that have staked out the same spots for generations. And they stand there for hours and hours, regardless of the weather, many handing runners cups of water or orange slices and cheering for people they’ve never met and probably never will.

It’s the one day of the year when taciturn Bostonians, and really all New Englanders, put aside their provincialism and truly embrace the outside world, and, in turn, reveal the very best of themselves.

Talk to runners about running Boston and they speak in reverence of not only the course and the tradition, but of the blanket of warmth that engulfs them from the very first mile to the very end.

I’ve had too many runners tell me they were literally carried along by the unceasing spirit of encouragement not to believe it.

And so it unfolded Monday. The Sox won in walk-off fashion in the ninth on Mike Napoli’s RBI-double in a tidy 3:03 game that ended in plenty of time for fans to head down through Back Bay to the Marathon course to catch the bulk of Marathon finishers.

Who knew what they were walking into? In the space of 12 seconds, two explosions killed at least three people, maimed and injured countless more and ripped away at least part of the purity that had made the Marathon — and by extension Patriot’s Day — a shimmering example of the handiwork of own best angels.

All across America, we grieve for that loss and for the menace that keeps leaking into our lives.

But in Boston, I guarantee you it’s a different grief, an Irish grief. I guarantee you it’s personal. And I will also guarantee you that, somehow, some way, next year will be the best Patriot’s Day ever.